I’ve been having odd issues with my Virgin Media TV box. Sometimes it starts moving around the menus, canceling and starting programs at random. I had thought it was overheating so I moved my hard drives away from it to make it run cooler and keep the vents at the side clear. It got a little better so I assumed it was the heat but it still did it sometimes so I thought it must be faulty and was going to call Virgin Media but now I have discovered the problem…

iPods.

I was watching something on the ‘On Demand’ service and stood up to charge my iPod in the dock. Which is on the shelf with my VCR, DVD and Virgin Media box. As soon as I moved the iPod near it it cancelled the program I had on and then went on a bare-arsed, screaming bender around the menus until it hit a brick wall and couldn’t do anything more.

“Odd..”, I thought to myself.

I set it back to the main menu and them moved the iPod near to it again. The same happened. I tried it with another iPod. Same again. The iPods weren’t even on, they were in sleep mode. I just tried and my mobile phone does the same thing to it.

Do people even bother testing devices for interference any more? Or to see if they interfere with other things?

I am going to have to work out a way of keeping sufficient distance between things now… I doubt I’ll be able to move the hard drives back onto the shelf where the iPods go either seeing as they caused a problem too.